Just some random thoughts here

THOUGHT ONE: For those of you mystified by the brevity of the last post, a word of advice:

Never, never ever, buy a BlackBerry.

The Verizon Store saw me coming a little over a year ago and sold me the first release of the BlackBerry Storm. I thought, “Wow, I’m a high-powered professional now! I got a BlackBerry! And not only that, I got the first one with a touchscreen instead of that old-fashioned keyboard!”

If my life were a Chuck Jones cartoon (and that wouldn’t be too much of a stretch), my face would’ve disappeared in favor of a big, swirly, tutti-fruitti all-day sucker. The battery life is a joke — it has the Tay-Sachs baby of batteries (didn’t say it was a good joke). The operating system was coded by a troop of Congolese bonobos that somebody shaved and granted developer access to. When you press an icon, you never know what’s going to happen — maybe you’ll get that app, maybe another app, maybe the lock will engage, maybe it’ll take a picture (a blurry, grainy picture), maybe it’ll dial the last person in the world you want to speak to. And that vaunted touchpad? It’s crap. If a text is going to be more than 50 characters, or an exchange is going to go past three outgoing messages, I just go all 19th-century and call whoever it is I’m trying to communicate with. Of course, in the 19th century you probably had fewer dropped calls than I get with the damn BlackBerry.

Worst of all, though, is that the Storm just doesn’t play nice with the Web. From the KGB reading (wondering when I was going to get back to that, huh?), I wanted to tweet that message, but I can’t enter anything into Twitter without — and I’m not kidding, not exaggerating — crashing the BlackBerry. I literally — literally! — have to turn off the phone, remove the battery, wait 10 seconds, put the battery back in, wait five minutes for the operating system to boot back up, and then resist the urge to try to tweet again. (“Maybe it’s just a glitch …”)

So I tried posting that sentiment to Facebook. And I could’ve done that for my own personal profile page. But this is writerly stuff, so I wanted to post it to my author’s page which, after all, is the one that automatically re-posts to Twitter. But the Storm wasn’t interested in loading my author’s page.

Oddly, I can blog from my phone. But I’d have to keep it short because of the not-worth-squirrel-piss touchscreen. But at least it flowed through to Twitter.

So that’s the long explanation for the short post. Bet you wish my phone was working but my computer was down now, dontcha?

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THOUGHT TWO: Return to DC!

I’ve been invited to participate in Capclave, a spec fiction convention scheduled for October 22-24 at the Hilton in Rockville, Md. As many of you know, I have many happy memories of my years in the Washington area and look forward to any excuse to go back. It’s where many of my closest friends live, and I hope to see as many of them as I can that weekend. (Leave a comment or ping me offline so we can begin making plans!)

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THOUGHT THREE: Milestone!

We’re over 1,000 page views on this web site. That won’t impress a serious blogger who’s been at this a while, but it’s still a nice, round number. The average volume per week keeps growing, so I must be doing something right. Lots of building yet to do, that’s for sure.

Thank YOU for all YOUR visits!

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THOUGHT FOUR: More frequent posting.

In addition to keeping you up-to-date on LTIL doings, I’d also like to report on Mighty Mighty’s development and my oh-so-deep political, religious and social commentary. One of my political statements is that, for those of us Americans who believe that a national healthcare policy is a good idea, being fat is tantamount to treason. I’m not exactly Benedict Arnold in the weight department, but neither am I Nathan Hale. Good news — and I’ll get into more detail later — is that I dropped about 10 pounds really fast and have kept it off. I expect to keep ratcheting down, so that there’s significantly less of me at Capclave than there was at Lunacon. As for M2, it’s at over 60,000 words — already longer than LTIL. I’m writing on a regular — I can’t honestly say daily — basis, rather than scrambling to put together a month’s worth of effort in the hours before my next crit group meeting.

And as for politics, religion, social criticism: I got a million of ’em. While I think up some fresh material, I’ll troll through some Facebook postings and see what’s worth repeating.